Incredible historical photos of mixed children of white fathers; caught between two worlds, manipulated to raise funds…
When eight former slaves aimed to drum up support for struggling African-American schools in the 1860s, they believed they had just the thing.
In order to garner sympathy – and funds – from rich northerners as they toured the country, organisers from New Orleans portrayed the slaves as white for a propaganda campaign, using four children with mixed-race ancestry and pale complexions.
They believed the white faces of Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs and Augusta Broujey would encourage donors to sympathise with the plight of recently-emancipated slaves and give more generously.
The youngsters are pictured together and with dark-skinned children in sepia-tinged photographs entitled ‘Emancipated Slaves’. Dressed in dapper clothing, they are photographed wrapped in American flags above text such as: ‘These children were turned out of [a hotel on account of color’.The images were mass-produced for a fundraising campaign following Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves in 1863.
Almost immediately after the law came into practice, Northerners and abolitionists set up relief organisations, which battled to establish schools and provide other forms of support – but their resources were limited.
They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county.
To keep Louisiana’s schools – comprised of nearly 10,000 pupils and nearly half the state’s number of black children – running, organisations launched a propaganda campaign. It was run by the National Freedman’s Association, the American Missionary Association and officers from the Union Army.
They gathered five children – four with pale complexions – and three adults who had all been slaves and sent them to the North on a publicity tour, according to Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, author of White Slaves.
http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/commentary/themes/white_slaves.pdf
http://trilogy.haverford.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/commentary/themes/white_slaves.php